okay in these new set of videos we're going to look at the norman conquest and the norman conquest unit is made up of five little sub or mini units anglo-saxon england invasion resistance castles and impact these first set of videos we're going to look at anglo-saxon england and we're going to do three videos the first is going to look at the nature structure and diversity of anglo-saxon society the second one we'll look at anglo-saxon religion in the last one we'll look at anglo-saxon culture in this video today i'm going to look at this key and the question i'm going to look at is who were the anglo-saxons who were the anglo-saxons really important we understand when the anglo-saxons ruled and the anglo-saxons really are the people that rule england between the romans and the normans up to roughly roughly 409 a.d the romans occupied britain and the romans were ruling britain up until that point now when the romans left it left britain in a kind of a bit of a state and england and britain was really at that point some historians used to call this the dark ages now in that period of the dark ages which actually most historians now don't use that phrase they now call this the early early middle ages in that period the anglo-saxons ruled and the anglo-saxons rule until 1066 and in 1066 at the battle of hastings the normans come in and take over from the anglo-saxons so the key thing that you need to understand here is the anglo-saxons are the group of people who are ruling britain and england in this period here let's go through and look in a little bit more depth at who they were so let's look at what anglo-saxon england was like the first thing that you need to understand is that england was a mixture of lots of different people and different groups there was vast diversity in england at this point people with very different cultures languages and beliefs the anglo-saxons become the most dominant of those groups and they are originally from germany from a region called saxony but there are other groups in england at this time too the original britons actually become the welsh at this point and there are other groups like the vikings those different groups often had conflict between them the other thing you need to understand is that england is actually only a single country towards the end of the anglo-saxon period and up to that point england was lots of little different kingdoms the anglo-saxons are the group that really unify those little kingdoms into a single country england and that doesn't happen until right towards the end in the 10th century in 954 a.d england all the way through this period is under the threat of viking invasion and the vikings threaten to invade throughout this period and there are lots of viking invasions and the vikings actually successfully push out the anglo-saxons in the period of the 11th century 1014 and 1042 and the vikings control the north the north and the east and so this is a period of conflict and i think that's another thing that we need to understand this is a period of conflict where people are trying to control this new country now by the year 1000 a.d english kings anglo-saxon kings had good strong central control over the country and they controlled it really effectively and they had a strong government the land was divided into shires and most of those shires had a burr and a burr was a fortified town and those towns encouraged trade so england was arguably thriving at this time in addition to that society was very controlled and was very centralized and was hierarchical and what we mean by that is there's a strong hierarchy where everybody had their place and that hierarchy looks similar to this at the bottom where the thralls above them were the curls above them were the thanes and then the earls and the king let's look at each of those groups in a little bit more depth the king was the one who was at the top and he had the most power the king in this period owned the most land he issued laws and he controlled justice and the last of the anglo-saxon kings the one that you need to remember the name of is edward the confessor and he was very religious underneath the king were the earls and the earls were the chief advisers at this time and the earls together formed a sort of parliament which we call the witan and the witan and the earls had the power to gather the army which let's use the anglo-saxon word here the third if there was a time of war and there was a lot of rivalry between those earls and a lot of hatred between them the most famous of those earls was harold godwinson we will come back to him later in this story the fans then are below the earls and there was roughly about 5 000 of them they ran the local courts and they collected taxes so they're kind of like the local powerful people underneath the thanes were the curls and the curls and the majority of the people in england at this time they were peasants some of them were very highly skilled though underneath the curls were the thralls and the thralls were the slaves and so england at this time had a slave society and some historians think that there was up to 10 of that population were slaves women are a really interesting position in anglo-saxon society though because actually lots of women were relatively free they could own their own land and actually women owned five percent of land in england at this time and they had a right to leave their husbands so you will notice just from this slide here the anglo-saxon england is an interesting place and it's an interesting place because there are lots of things happening some of those things are great and some of them are less so and that leads us on to this historical debate because the big historical debate here when we look at anglo-saxon england is was it a golden age or not some historians think it was a golden age a time of glory and good and things are going well other historians think that it was much more complicated and that there is evidence that this was not a golden age and this is the thread that's going to run through the next three videos